[Anita Walz] Good afternoon everyone, thank you so much for being here today.
My name is Anita Walz. I'm the open education, copyright and
scholarly communication librarian here at Virginia Tech and I am very honored
to welcome to you to the fifth annual celebration of open education week at
Virginia Tech. This is our second symposium formally that we have had and
we do this because we believe that there are a lot of things for us to learn
about leveraging technology and open licenses as well as sharing that can
improve student learning and that can benefit the work of the academy.
So I want to thank a few people before we get started. If you are on the planning
committee, would you please raise your hand? okay so there and there's one more
okay so there are four people besides myself:
Kayla McNabb, Alex Kinnaman, Corinne Guimont and Peter Potter, thank you very
much for oh and I want to also think that the teams who have helped with IT
support and setup and food and marketing and and those of you who presented
earlier this afternoon posters I think this is a really great testament to the
kind of interest that there is in this topic so I'd like to introduce to you MJ Bishop.
Dr. MJ Bishop is associate vice chancellor and director of the William
Kirwan Center for academic innovation of the University System of Maryland.
She's been in this role since 2013. The center researches best practices, disseminates
information, and offers professional development opportunities for faculty
and administrators, all in support of the system's 12 four-year institutions.
Prior to her current role, Bishop served for four years as a program director for
teaching learning and technology at Lehigh University where she was a
faculty member for 13 years in instructional design and technology.
I also understand that many of you have met her before because of your
affiliation with instructional design, so if you're an instructional designer, a
special warm welcome to you as well. Dr. Bishop has held roles outside of the
academy as well. Prior to Lehigh, she was a software development project manager,
vice president for operations of the multimedia thinking skills project where
she was principally responsible for the daily management of the MMT 's project
supervising multimedia developers, assisting with the instructional design,
and bringing the lead instructional designers ideas from inception to
storyboarding to actual code and supporting programmers efforts by coding
some modules and modifying programs as necessary. I met Dr. Bishop at the Open
Education 2018 conference in Niagara Falls and said I need to get permission
but would you please come and talk with us? She said yes and then I got
permission and was able to formally invite her but I'm really pleased to
introduce to you MJ Bishop, who will talk with us about
improving access, affordability, and achievement with open educational resources.
[MJ Bishop] Wow, there's hardly time left for my talk!
Thank you for that introduction. So thanks to all - thanks to all of
you for sticking around today and waiting to listen to this talk.
I'm so honored to be part of the 2019 Open Education Symposium for the Hokies.
There's a lot of red and burgundy around, I tried to represent
with the Maryland colors here both in my title slide and in my outfit today so
hopefully you know I'm making our stand here as Marylanders.
Anita, thank you so much for inviting me, thanks to the Planning Committee for
having me here today. As you heard in the introduction I direct this Center, this
William Kirwan Center for academic innovation and prior to that was at Lehigh.
Lehigh, if you don't know where it is or what it is, it's up in Pennsylvania
a couple of folks know in the back there and Lujean used to be a neighbor of
ours at Lehigh. It's a research intensive institution. As Anita said I
spent 13 years in the instructional design and Technology program there
connecting research on the role that technology can and should play in
teaching and learning so it was an interesting opportunity when I learned
of it to come to Maryland and to apply those kinds of skills to the work that
we're doing in Maryland around teaching and learning and academic innovation
looking back on that now it's hard to believe since six years since I gave up
that tenured position but I'll tell you I've never looked back it's been a wild
ride and I've really been enjoying the work I mean I want to give you a little
more background it's indeed said I am an instructional designer so you're gonna
hear a lot of that perspective and my talk today but I also want to tell you a
little bit about Maryland so you can understand the context within which
we're working Maryland is kind of an interesting state you know it's been
called America in miniature partially because you know we're small enough that
anybody on either end of the state can pretty much drive we can drive to each
other for meetings and we regularly have face-to-face meetings we regularly get
together and have conversations it's also has a real diversity of
environments right so out there on the Panhandle like you guys were out in the
mountains on the Eastern Shore we've got the beaches we've got the rural you know
institutions we've got a lot of suburban spaces and so forth and our higher end
institutions really I think also reflect this diversity in the system there are
12 of us as you can see on the slide and we've got a range from research
intensive - we've got three HBCUs we have one entirely online institution and
the rest are regional comprehensive so we're a little unique in that regard
but I think at least from doing the innovation work it's a great place to be
to be engaging faculty and administrators in these conversations
more importantly however I had the opportunity to build on a lot of really
strong leadership out of the system office Brit Kirwan the person for whom
this Center my center is named spent many many years talking about the extent
to which state systems might be able to be something more than just an
organization that keeps the lights on and the trains running on time but in
fact might actually be able to help lead some of this kind of academic innovation
work so and that started back in 20 2006 when the State System office actually
led a lot of course redesign work across the state not just in the the four-year
public higher ed institutions but also for our two-year institution colleagues
as well who are not actually part of our system we're just made up of the four
years so Maryland's been a great place to do this work as I said but as it
turns out Maryland does not make a particularly good cutting board this was
the housewarming gift I got from my mother-in-law when we moved to Maryland
and as you can see it hangs on a wall because there's not enough room for the
cheese would have been a whole lot easier if she bought us one while we
were still in Pennsylvania I think made it what made it a lot easier um you may
have also noticed I'm sure that Maryland is really really really proud of its
flag we put it on everything from animals to clothing to household items
and even book bags and Christmas tree ornaments so trust me nobody gets this
excited over the Pennsylvania flag for sure ah so the current Center's mission
is to capitalize on the recent findings from the learning Sciences and the
capabilities of emerging technologies to increase access affordability and
achievement for our students and in addition to that to identify best
practices and facilitate efforts not just a scale but also something I've
added recently to this statement to sustain them as well and you're going to
hear that theme in in my talk today but if you notice oh we
are is not in my mission statement in fact I've ul o er is one of the many
arrows in my quiver when it comes to thinking about the ways in which we can
facilitate change with respect to academic innovation and in addition to
that we're doing things with online learning learner and learner learning
analytics alternative credentials competency-based approaches to
curriculum design just to name a few also as I said before given my
background I tend to view the challenges we face in higher ed very much from a
lens of an instructional designer which I think as I said will become clear to
you as we move through this talk so the Kirwan Center set out to fulfill this
mission starting in 2013 that's when I went down to Maryland became the
inaugural director and you may recall 2013 was the year of the MOOC right and
if you've been paying attention since then you know that much of the
discussion in the media about innovation in higher ed has been premise taun the
idea faculty would just embraced these technologies these bright shiny objects
and bring them into the classroom we could fix what's wrong with higher
education unfortunately it turns out the history of technology used in education
over the last hundred years paints a rather bleak picture of the extent to
which technology in and of themselves can really affect this kind of change in
fact it was just a little over 100 years ago 2013 now excuse me 1913 shortly
after Bell had invented the motion picture film excuse me
Thomas Edison and I went up and looked at my notes a little bit before I came
down so sorry about that Thomas Edison claimed in an interview that the best
use of his new invention would be for educational purposes because it was now
going to be possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the
motion picture books will be completely obsolete and scholars will be instructed
with the eyes Thomas Edison 2013 he was so enthusiastic over the motion pictures
instructional potential in fact that he predicted educational films would change
schooling completely in ten years similarly in the 30s and 40s it was
widely expected that the combined effect of radios voice sound effects and music
might gain learners attention and stimulate their imaginations
so when educational radio came on to the scene pundits claimed it had
undreamed-of possibilities for education that would resurrect the aural
instructional techniques employed so successfully by famous teachers of the
past like Socrates and my personal favorite that could have come right out
of a Thomas Friedman article back around 2013 remember him in The New York Times
he said there will be vast universe at waller said there will be vast
universities of the air with courses taught by the national leaders of their
fields and so these patterns have repeated over and over again as we trace
the history of technology used in education mostly k12 granite but still
in the 50s and 60s for example during the baby boom television was touted as
an efficient and inexpensive way to satisfy the nation's instructional needs
and in the 70s and 80s the mainframes and then the personal computers were
predicted to provide students with access to the personal services of a
tutor as well-informed in as responsive as Aristotle it turns out as one traces
this history of technology use there's an incredibly clear pattern that emerges
first come the big claims the enthusiastic claims of educational
benefits this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and it's going to
revolutionize education education as we know it right now will cease to exist
the new technology then bowls everyone over say hurry to figure out what to do
with it without a set of guidelines or foundation and research to suggest best
practices then come the logistical difficulties little consideration given
to the practicability of working with the new technology in the classroom so
radio shows lasted longer than class periods no effort was given to aligning
content of the programs with curriculum huge expense of purchasing and
maintaining these things that the the the bulbs and the radios the transistor
bulbs cost lots and lots of money burned out regularly and in some cases
there were even safety issues in New York City there were reports of these
phone projectors catching on fire and I'm having to like evacuate the whole
school and so forth but the biggest issue was there was little to no
instructor training and what training they did get was often in functions you
know you've got you've had this training here's how you print here's how you you
know log things in but without training in thinking about what to actually do
with this stuff consequently it ends up being a huge hassle for the for the
instructor and then last but not least the research starts to trickle in
research that is comparing technology based instruction to traditional methods
and yields no significant differences and then we dismiss the whole enterprise
out of hand on the basis of an underlying underlying lack of
instructional substance sound familiar right we just went through this cycle
recently with the MOOCs and we do this time and time again and in the end
unfortunately the basic act of teaching ends up getting changed very little
despite all of the hype and for some reason the technologies that have
transformed a whole range of businesses such as car manufacturing sector the
retail sector have not had the same transformative impact on education for
education like nursing and other labor intensive sectors that rely on human
interaction or activities the technologies we've had available to us
to date simply have not been capable of producing the kind of growth in
productivity let's use that word for a little bit over time to transform the
way we do business stated differently it takes nurses the same amount of time to
change a bandage today as it did 50 years ago in 1969 and the same largely
holds true for education it takes college professors the same amount of
time to mark an essay as it did fifty years ago in 1969 this cost disease was
first discussed by William Baumol and Bill Bowen in the 1960s bear with me a
little bit I know it's late in the day for an education
an economics lesson but I think this is actually kind of interesting it explains
a lot at least for me that top line when technological innovations come into
those sectors productivity increases at a rate similar to or even greater than
the rise in wages for the workers in that sector as a result of course we get
a decrease in the cost per unit the bottom row where education is when those
sectors get introductions and when technology technology gets introduced
into those sectors the wages increase but the productivity does not because
the technologies aren't really helping us do things better faster more
efficiently which ends up resulting in an increase in cost per unit over time
so what's really interesting for me in this was that Bommel the observation
bomber made was that when this happens the industries in that top row begin
exerting serious pressure on the bottom row to start becoming more productive
which for higher education at least is translating into you're not producing
enough graduates to meet the workforce needs of the 21st century those that you
do graduate don't have the skills we need ok this is all very depressing I'm
sorry I always feel like when I do that opening I've been such a buzzkill but I
think it's really important for us to understand what Tecna technology's role
is in all of this the technologies that have revolutionised other industries and
holds such great promise for transforming higher education won't lead
to meaningful change unless we figure out how to break this cycle so let's
take a step back and figure out how we do that let's explore this assumption
that simply inserting any bright shiny new objects into the mix can fix things
and go back to our definitions so I was an English major how many English majors
in the room yes we do find jobs I believe as an informer English major
in the power of the words we use so let's take a minute to unpack what is
meant exactly by technology yes the average person you know how do you
define technology they're gonna point to one of these devices right when in fact
if you look up the definition of the word you'll find that most scholars view
that term more broadly to mean the application of our knowledge about tools
techniques or systems to solve practical problems it's kind of a mash up of a
bunch of definitions that I've found over the years so in addition to the
fact that terms meaning is actually a lot broader than most people realize the
Joe on the street realize there are a few other things that should strike us
about this definition first in some respects technology's actually more of a
verb than a noun while it often involves some sort of thing like a tool Technic
system it's the application or how we use the thing that's the key in this
definition second note that what's actually being applied is our knowledge
of the thing this suggests we must have a keen sense of the affordances or the
action possibilities that the thing provides upon which we might capitalize
and I'm going to explain a little bit more about that in a minute and third
the definition presupposes some practical problem that must be solved or
a need that must be addressed one might even say that without that need without
the fact without us actually doing this thing to solve a practical problem it
can't be called a technology at all stated differently in order for
technology to help us get results we need to be very certain of the
underlying problems to be solved and have a thorough understanding of the
capabilities of the tools that we're using to solve those problems and
address those needs so let's type take a little bit of time here and and work
through this together so what's the big practical problem we're trying to solve
right now in higher education we could look at a lot of things but I think the
biggest thing that we're trying to do particularly as public higher ed
institutions is figuring out how to do more with less
during the past ten years as you all know and we know very well in Maryland
as well the financial meltdown of the Great Recession of 2008 and it's
aftermath had created funding shortfalls and altered campus revenue streams
shifting higher education for what economists perceived as a public good to
a private good the Great Recession decimated state
budgets and while we have had financial turndowns before the past higher
education in the past higher education eventually recovered these dollars but
not this time only six states have had higher ed budgets returned to or
surpassed their pre recession levels and in nineteen states expenditures per
student or at least 20 percent lower than before the recession leaving higher
ed institutions in those states scrambling to find alternative sources
of revenue part of that revenue course is coming from tuition increases recent
study at a temple found that for every $1,000 in funds cut by the state
colleges raised tuition by about 300 at the beginning of the last decade college
students who went to public universities paid for about one-third of their
education today in more than half the states they pay for most of it at public
higher ed institutions additionally as we're all aware our student demographics
are changing dramatically the non-traditional student is becoming the
new normal with nearly one-half of students who are currently enrolled in
higher ed now fitting into this category according to NCES National Center for
Education Statistics the 17 million Americans enrolled in undergraduate
higher education look very differently than they did when I went to school and
I think it's a good thing one in five is at least 30 years old one in four is
caring for a child about half of financially independent from their
parents a quarter take a year off before starting school two out of five attend a
two-year Community College 47% go to school part-time at some point 44
percent have parents who never completed a bachelor's degree unfortunately too
few of our four-year educational institutions however are adequate to
adequately addressing these changes in demographics particularly with respect
to their constant competing tension between obligations and educational
excuse me life obligations in educational
patience this sends these students the message that this place isn't made for
me and we end up with a whole lot of these students unfortunately dropping
out long before they finish their their degree programs with us we need to
rethink who today's post-secondary students are and figure out how to serve
their needs but how do we do this while our budgets are shrinking okay so that's
the big practical problem then finding ways excuse-me them what do we know
about the tools we have available to us so the key to understanding what the
tools provide is in having knowledge --is knowledge of what psychologists
call affordances an affordance is the relationship between a tool and an
individual that affords the opportunity for that individual to perform in action
so what the heck does that mean exactly well for example a switch affords
flipping a button affords pushing a knob affords twisting the way each of these
light switches has been designed suggest to us the action were to take even
without us having to see instructions or understand or having been trained in how
to use it and we see if portance is all around us right so you've seen these now
these recycling centers now that suggests what you're supposed to put in
each of these things you certainly can't get your water bottle into that slit for
the paper for example that's an affordance affordances essentially both
suggest and also help to shape action in this way and in some cases the Atul's
affordances can also create barriers to action this is the cover of the design
of everyday things by Donald Norman I've always loved this this image but we see
these kinds of situations all around us for example this is a really tough room
in which to teach a flipped active learning class the affordances of the
room do not lend themselves to to doing stuff so with the understanding the
practical problem for higher ed today and the affordances of the available
tools the next step is to decide exactly how will make best use of the tools and
how to figure out how we avoid the temptation to use the tools to do
in the same way we've always done them in the past this functional fixedness as
psychologists call it was illustrated by mayor's to string problem from 1931 you
guys familiar with this so so the idea was that participants were required to
figure out a way to use to tie the two strings together even though when
holding on to one string the other string was out of reach a variety of
objects were available in the room you can see there on the desk for use in
solution of the problem the researcher would tell the
participant including a pair of pliers well as you can imagine as I would have
done first thing most of the participants did was grab the pliers and
try to use the pliers to extend the reach but unfortunately it wasn't they
weren't long enough to make that work instead the solution to this problem was
to think about some of the other affordances of the pliers anybody think
of one except you okay what what's that cut mm well that would be that might
have been cheating I don't know no
anybody else
break the yeah I I think it's sort of what he was
suggesting where you cut it yeah okay oh you could break the lock yeah you could
do damage to the to the room well in this case the solution was to use the
weight of the pliers to get the other strings swinging like a pendulum and
then you could grab it and grab the other string so in addition to being a
tool that extended your reach the other affordance of the pliers was just simply
its weight our functional fixedness and education could probably be best
illustrated by this this photograph that came from a Larry Cuban book that he
wrote actually way back in 1986 photographs from the 20s can you tell
what you're looking at here oh man you're a ringer
you're exactly right it is actually an extraordinary in the 20s in Los Angeles
for students to experience geography firsthand from the windows of an
airplane but what are they doing what's the teacher doing pointing at a globe
yeah and if you look even further you'll see that she's standing under a clock
there's a chalkboard there everything else so what they did was essentially
take what they knew about teaching and pedagogy and just simply replicated that
inside this airplane and not even particularly well right I mean they were
pretty cramped in there and you know the kids are just looking focused on the
teacher and not out the windows so let's apply this same idea to our recent
experience with MOOCs thinking about MOOCs like that pair of
pliers or like that airplane what's the one affordance we've failed to really
capitalize on
what's it yeah you think we're already kind of doing online we already doing
courses we yeah you could argue maybe we were already doing online let's not get
into the open thing because I know you know folks the open education
evangelists will argue all day long that MOOCs aren't really open for me it's the
massiveness piece sure we've exhausted the scalability part of the massiveness
but what about the opportunities massiveness can afford for community
connections and worldwide collaborations among learners you all had a colleague
over here that was presenting about a see move project that they were working
on but the guys that have been doing a lot of this work are researchers such as
george siemens and stephen downes who envisioned capitalizing on the MOOCs
massive 'no supportin sin terms of what they call X MOOCs and see MOOCs so
here's how this works they said sure go ahead use the scale
part of the massiveness to increase access to learning about core skills
concepts and do have students do some light application then capitalize on the
affordances of being together in a face-to-face environment where a teacher
would help guide students in authentic project-based kinds of experiences and
application of the skills lastly then and this is where they think
the real magic of the affordance is design something called a seam OOP that
capitalizes on how the massiveness brings folks together to do things like
crowdsourcing solutions to wicked problems and building community around
doing that's a whole different way to think about the massiveness what
massiveness supports and can help us begin thinking about doing things
differently in the way that we're delivering instruction okay so what am I
about twenty minutes into this talk I've not yet talked about ARS right
people sit in the back of room saying when is she at a time when we are as I
said this is about opened' week well let's talk about are we ours how are we
doing with open educational resources in terms of the real affordances that
they're bringing to the table just like the massiveness of MOOCs that was going
to scale education and make it affordable and accessible to the masses
the three nests of oh we are has been the thing everyone has been jumping all
over and there's no question that the OEO movement has made huge strides in
saving students money as well as improving access you know you all know
because you've been doing this work the numbers add up really quickly but have
oer s begun to change the way we do things or are we simply replicating what
we've always done in the past swapping textbooks for oer and calling it a day
please don't get me wrong now I love free stuff in fact free got us on
Jeopardy about a year ago our University of Maryland University College which is
our online institution moved entirely to I would argue zero cost textbooks and lo
and behold we've there was a Jeopardy question about it
of course the answer was Oh er but that's a conversation for another day
and believe me in addition to these kinds of things I've been the first to
lead with this message particularly when talking to state legislators and others
there's a time when the message about saving taxpayers and students money
really resonates for example when your governor is signing the bill that
actually supports your textbook initiative and I realized after I was
looking at my slides a little bit ago I'm actually wearing the same outfit
this was a picture from the the bill signing the governor built that's the
governor down there saying Oh a what's the textbook affordability Act of 2017
you charged the Kirwan Center and the most initiative with helping to scale
and pride opportunities for faculty to explore Oh a ours across the state it
was a very hot day the governor was pretty irritated by the end of the day
because things weren't moving along fast enough so this is the picture that I
ended up with so I use it whenever I can and these presentations and hoping I'll
get another opportunity to have my picture taken with governor one day but
as we really begin to dig into what it's going to take to scale and sustain oay
our adoptions that our institutions we're also coming to terms with quite a
huge undertaking oh we are curation adaptation creation and sustainability
is going to be and I know many of you here at Virginia Tech and elsewhere have
begun to experience this and some of you may have heard this joke before right oh
we are spri like a puppy this is my what used to be my puppy Cooper he's now two
years old he wasn't even free to start with but trust me he is far from free
now there's just you know the expense of maintaining feeding all that good stuff
we're coming to realize that that care and feeding of this oay our puppy isn't
so free for our institutions who have we as we've already discussed are
increasingly resourced strapped several of us are working now in the some of
these statewide initiatives on trying to figure out what oh we are it is going to
cost exactly to our institutions in terms of actual dollars and human
resources expended in these activities and while it's going to take us a little
while to figure that out we'll get there eventually so for the sake of argument
today let's just say that we determined that that figures around twenty to
twenty-five dollars per student per course what costs our institutions to
take on this work and to do this work over time so my question to you all is
what happens when the publishers are finally able to get their offerings of
copyrighted materials down to twenty-five dollars
they're moving in this direction now you see the articles almost weekly now in
the chronicle and inside higher education or to take it a step further
what happens when the publishers bring the costs of copyrighted materials down
to even less than what we calculate the cost of Oh a our per student per course
will be for our institutions what then is the value proposition of open and how
do we sell that to our faculty or administrators or Regents our
legislators do we just declare victory say yeah we beat the publishers it's a
copyrighted people pack up our things and go home at that point or is there
something more here that we're missing in terms of the affordances let's go
back to our definition again for a moment what do we know about the
affordances of oh we are well they're not just free oh we are allows us the
ability the five RS to retain reuse revise remix and redistribute content
that's the open part and what are we trying to accomplish so remember we're
going through our parts of the technology definition so these are the
affordances what's the need what are we trying to do well unequivocally for us
it's about student success land-grant public for your higher ed institutions
this is our mission and that mission as I see it is wrapped up into this iron
triangle of three things access affordability and achievement and I call
it an Iron Triangle because these things have tended to have a fairly reciprocal
relationship to one another at least in the past when we try to increase
achievement through more quality programs and so forth that tends to
drive up cost when we increase access that can tend to also drive up costs or
decrease achievement so these things have tended to influence each other as
we've tried in one way or another to increase all three now the movement the
open movement has been making progress I would argue
on those bottom two huge progress increasing access and affordability and
we've also been making some progress on the top bar I don't want to the
achievement piece I don't want to dismiss that there have been you know
having access to instructional materials on day one of class has been shown to
make a big difference in student achievement the work that many are doing
around open education open pedagogy all proving to be very promising but what
happens getting back to our four dances what happens when we further capitalise
on the five hours part of being open and began systematically engaging in
revising remix agree distributing to improve student achievement in our
courses what happens when we couple these oh we are s with the data we need
to understand what's working and what's not working for our students and then
use what we know from that and from good design to create course materials that
we later really and then redesign again is needed I recently this is certainly
not a copyright or open image I've actually recently come to the
realization that the open part of oh we are maybe a super affordance that
finally allows us to increase all three of these things simultaneously access
affordability and achievement but only if we're willing to build on the
successes we've already realized based on the free part and use the affordances
to also change the way we're currently teaching using data more effectively to
assess the impact on student achievement and then redesigning when we discover we
haven't gotten things quite right that's the value proposition of open that will
actually change the way we're doing things as compared to simply using ORS
swapping them out for the textbooks that we've always used in the past so what
I'm talking about here of course is in addition to sounding very much like the
Addie model that the instructional designers will not say yeah
analyze design develop and and evaluate rinse and repeat right but
in addition to that I'm talking here about continuous quality improvement
which is a term I know we get a little worried about when we when we talk about
it in higher ed circles and I know it will require fairly significant culture
change at our institutions in order to implement it but we're going to miss out
on this opportunity and here's why when you're faculty who have spent all their
time adopting oer and gone through all of that course redesign and everything
else and put these things into their courses and realize what it lifts that
was and it is can be a heavy lift when they've realized that they have to go
back and do it again because the materials have gotten out of date or
something has changed and mcgraw-hill walks in with their twenty dollars
solution your faculty you're going to jump straight to that and we've missed
this opportunity to capitalize on the open part because it's only been about
free and I think I know for me I've been guilty of this I think the movement has
been guilty about this and I think it's time for us to shift this conversation
in a different direction so let me come back to that not so free Oh er puppy -
I'm really seriously worried about this our higher ed institutions are in no
position to take on all the roles of publishers that serve person have passed
I was in a meeting recently and somebody said oh okay well we're it was at UMUC
where they've done all that oh we are work well we're just taking on the role
publisher so I thought oh gosh no we can't do that I think some of our when I
think about some of our resource strapped schools in the University
System of Maryland is an example Coppin State University being one West
Baltimore that's where the Freddie gray lost his life we had the riots over the
inequities the very institutions that most need to be providing these kinds of
resources for their students are the least capable of actually being able to
engage in this conversation in order to sustain this work I think what we need
is to find some ways to create efficiencies across the sector the
higher ed sector to avoid bankrupting the very institutions who are serving
the students who are most trying to help we need access to inexpensive digital
rights and accessibility compliant service
that's a heavy-lift UMUC the lesson learned from from them for me was was
squarely in the space we need better support for curation including national
standards around meta tagging and cataloguing oh we are for
discoverability I'm learning that from my library colleagues and have actually
learned how to say all those words and put them in a sentence
we need more oer materials at higher levels we need training for faculty and
students how to teach and interact with oer x' one of the things we're starting
to find i don't know if you all are but there's a lot of confusion around
academic integrity with respect to Oh ers what when am i copying when am I not
copying how does all of these things all jive we need to figure out how to
support our institutions when their books torts bookstores start closing
down this was something I heard from one of our community colleges holy cow the
bookstores ready to walk away because we've implemented enough oer they're
starting to lose enough business they're not going to stick around but what do I
do with the rest of my courses we need transition plans and support for
institutions as they're making these moves we need a set of unified standards
and a system for review of oh we are quality and peer review of content and
last but not least I think it's the most important thing we need a system that
incentivizes faculty not with money necessarily all the time but with a
reward system similar to the citations index that we use for scholarly
publications and I want to spend just another minute
or two talking about that piece this last point what I'm envisioning is
something sort of like soda on steroids you all know what soda is a scholarship
of teaching and learning right I'm with a knowledgeable crowd in this case so in
this I like this illustration it came from the teaching Center at Washington
University in st. Louis but the idea here of course is that the green part is
what I've been talking about this engaging in you know finding a problem
modifying pedagogy assessing it and reflecting and discussing student
learning and kind of that that's cycle that virtuous cycle of redesign there
the idea was solo then is that you then offload that into a publication that's
the blue there that gets peer-reviewed you
publish it and you draw on and contribute to laboratory and classroom
based research for the larger knowledge base sounds great but imagine a
situation where the assessment of our contributions to teaching through Oh a
ours that we've created or that we've we've revised or that we've we've
contributed to that that those things can be much more easily quantified
directly impacting the knowledge and knowledge practices of our professional
and scholarly communities through networked and indexed instructional
materials that carry with them the analytics to tell us how they have
impacted student learning now I have something more like a citations index of
my contributions to teaching now I have something that I can quantify and point
to and have much more valid if you will measures of my contributions than for
example the course evaluations that we all struggle with this is something that
could be really really exciting in my mind now I'm not naive I know none of
these things will be easy undertakings we've already started to have some
conversations around the room during the poster session about exactly that in
fact in order to do this work as herb Simon said I think we're going to need
to convert teaching from a solo sport to a community-based research activity and
that may be one of the biggest things that we have to overcome initially but
that's the premise from which we're working in Maryland how am i doing on
time I need a couple more minutes okay just real briefly tell you a little bit
about what we're doing in Maryland and then if if you're interested in learning
more I can answer some questions when I'm finished the Maryland open source
textbook initiative actually started literally weeks after I began in this
position in August of 2013 when the USM student council president came to me and
said we want to make textbook affordability our big project this year
I thought great that's great I have no idea what I'm doing in this
position so this is good I'll get to work with students and it sounds like a
worthwhile thing there were two things they insisted upon they said when when
we're gonna collaborate on this the first one was that it shouldn't just be
about the USM it should also include the community colleges I thought great and
in fact that has turned out to be oppression and that you know now we're
engaging in two-year four-year conversations about sharing course
materials and talking about transfer pathways in a way that we've never done
in the past the second thing the student council president said to me was and we
want to go straight to Annapolis and drop a bill that will require all
faculty to adopt yars in the next two years I said okay well that's a little
heavy-handed and we know that's not working so well in other states maybe
instead we can appeal to the faculty that actually have already engaged in
course redesign all these years I think they'll be easy for us to convince but
we've got to build awareness we got it and we have to help faculty understand
the the the benefits of oer and really communicate this message of course in
2013 that was all about cost but today now we the the the most initiative is
still while it's still being led by the current wind center we're actually now
in partnership with our maryland association of community colleges mac
and also now the maryland association of independent universities and colleges so
we're working also with private institutions in the state and with
support from the Hewlett Foundation we're working to refocus most in order
to build the infrastructure needed to create efficiencies and capitalize on
the other affordances from this project such as finding ways to enhance
conversations as I said across the two years and four years for transfer
pathways and so forth so we've recently reread in our mission statement I won't
read through this word for word but the idea is that in this work we're
providing the collaborative infrastructure that art and I need to
add private that was a new addition recently institutions need to support
effective and efficient Oh er adoption adaptation and creation and in the
mission statement we're very clear about the fact that this is about empowering
and rewarding faculty who capitalize on the opportunities afforded by openly
licensed materials to optimize to learning through continuous quality
improvement there we put it out there that
CQI phrase and our goals have been rewritten in three parts to be about
shifting the conversation away from being just about affordability to about
student success supporting effective and efficient adoption creation and
adaptation to optimize student achievement and developing processes
models and reward structures for stating which is sustaining the work over time
so in conclusion I have to admit as you probably gathered from this presentation
it's not about oh we are for me really that's one of the arrows in my quiver is
one of many things that I'm working with right now trying to affect change within
the system the technology in and of itself I don't believe will make a
difference unless we find ways to capitalize on the openness affordance
and use that to change the way we think about how we engage with instructional
materials and our courses what's critical now is that we don't simply use
the tools to perpetuate doing things the way we've always done them in the past
that's not going to result in any significant differences instead we need
to be aimed at helping us understand what needs to be fixed
and how to capitalize on the importances of emerging technologies like oh we are
to best address those needs until we make that shift I will continue to argue
that unfortunately the technology in of itself is not going to help us realize
the promise that it has for other industries in the past so that's all I
have thank you for your attention
okay great good we have a few minutes for questions
thoughts tell me I'm crazy
well obviously we are to some extent using monetary rewards but we are
working very hard at trying to create an infrastructure that would reward faculty
for reviewing oer for contributing oer in and so forth so yeah that's that's
all part because we do this to some degree at the system level and adjust
policies that then the institutions adopt we're looking at trying to include
some of those sorts of things that's what I'm sorry that's what I meant yeah
exactly trying to build that into the promotion and tenure conversation and
and to some agreement do that from the top from the system level these
strategies in mind well one of the things that we've been having a lot of
conversations about and and we were talking during the poster sessions a
little bit about I think we need to begin targeting the Disciplinary
associations with respect to this work and as I think about my research
colleagues our one colleagues that's that's the place where this is going to
really make a difference and we've been collaborating three system-wide and well
statewide initiatives Maryland SUNY and CUNY have been talking to each other for
about two years now that was a funny story they came to me after they got
their first infusion of eight million dollars for their for their new
york-based work and called and said hey we want to collaborate it said yeah sure
okay bring your money and I'm be happy to collaborate but I honestly thought we
were chasing after SUNY and it turned out you know all of us are still trying
to figure this out but we're actually in the process of creating it's called
dewers OB ours is in the middle and D I think it's for designing for designing
OE ours for student success and sustainability is what it stands for
we're getting other statewide initiatives
on board and one of the first things I think we're going to try to target is
conversations with the Disciplinary organizations about exactly these
questions so you know I think the oer piece is one big part of it but
certainly open access publishing those sorts of things it would be a part of
that discussion as well what is environment your personal
yeah we're only just beginning to really unpack that now and understand you know
that it's gonna need to be I I think some of the most promising things I'm
seeing out there right now for helping us with that is the the platforms that
are delivering oh we ours that have the analytics behind them which by the way
costs money you know everybody again this is part of
what we're running up against in Maryland
you know everybody's been convinced about the free part and then when you
come back to faculty and say okay now here I've got a product lumen Weiwei
maker is one that we've worked with quite a bit but the oli products as well
now they're beginning to charge a small student licensing fee for the platform
not for the OU ers we're not reselling only ours but for the platform those
tools however are really beginning to demonstrate for us the ways in which not
only students are achieving through the use of oer but also where there are
issues that need to be fixed unfortunately right now the tools and
the technologies only make it possible for lumen to go back and fix the issue
what I'd love to see us get to eventually is for me to be able to
locally fix that issue so if I'm teaching I keep using UMUC today but
they're an adult serving institution if I'm teaching there in chapter 4 of the
book I'm using doesn't resonate with my students because it's all you know the
examples are all pointing at 18 year old kinds of examples I can go in and fix
that I can make that change and see that make a difference in my students
achievement that's where I'd like to see things going until then you know it's
the typical messy educational research situation well we can't really be sure
if it's the oer is making a difference or something else in the environment so
i don't have the silver bullet on that yet but i think we need to be having
this conversation and figuring out how exactly we do that
and we're not measuring achievement with oh we are it's not a standalone thing
it's in comparison with what they were achieving
we expected more
I think we should be yeah absolutely I think we should be expecting working
from we are because we have this ability to remix reuse revise you know that the
traditional textbook right now because it has been so fully vetted and very
often has been used over many many years and it has been revised often right now
we're finding that it may be the better set of instructional materials but if we
get to this place where we can engage in this continuous quality improvement on
the OE RS then I think that can actually not only eventually give as good or
better but also create that context based environment that will help
students achieve better comparison studies are problematic however and as I
said earlier in the presentation so I think instead what we ought to be
thinking about there is more of a kind of Delta analysis where we're looking at
you know how did students do in the previous iteration and we made it's a
design research kind of study you know here's how they did in the previous
iteration here the changes we made how are they doing now and and think about
student achievement along those lines at least in terms of measuring not easy
answers to these questions you guys are asking good ones
I would love to and I would love to be much more nuanced about student learning
outcomes in addition to the things you just mentioned absolutely
any other questions
I need it's gonna make you sit and think about it sure
and I think in this area where we really taking a lot what it costs to create
these things and like you were saying the UMBC school they can just adapt to
textbook that's not an easy thing to do so the resources have to go into doing
that and doing it well
yeah no question about it I think there's a huge big question mark around
that but you know I know at the are ones and we find it also very much more so at
the private institutions that's the first thing our faculty go to right they
want to create because there's that not invented here issue so you know I think
if we're going to be doing this at institutions like Virginia Tech Maryland
College Park we're going to need to think hard about what that looks like
and can we support it I recently got sure was I have any conversation with
doggone it escape me but the the what this person told me was if we haven't
first created a really strong curation process and infrastructure before we
move to creation we could end up spinning our wheels on that creation
part you know that we need person and from an instructional design perspective
we call it the needs and that gap analysis needs analysis you know we need
to really understand what's there what's out there where the gaps are and then be
pointing faculty to the things that we really need them to work on as compared
to everybody inventing the new psychology 100 open textbook so I think
I think we can realize some efficiencies there especially if we start working
together collaboratively it's one of the things I'm thinking about in Maryland is
you know why not get each of the libraries to focus on a certain body of
materials that need to be curated compare notes figure out where the gaps
are in particular figure out where the gaps are with respect to things in
Maryland that we're trying to work on good workforce and everything else and
then and be be more collaborative along those lines to try to realize at least
some efficiencies in this
yes please explain further about five cars sure yeah
that's the heart of what o we are s and we could go into great amount of detail
you see if I can quickly come up with that slide bottom line is that the
licensing for the creative usually creative commons licensing for an open
resource allows these three things or these five things to happen that you can
make your own content control your own copy of the content you essentially get
to hold on to it to the extent that you want to you can reuse it in its
unaltered form but you can also revise it adapt to just modify improve or alter
the content in any way you see fit what the Creative Commons license does
however so if you've taken my content and you've been your you're reusing it
you're you're revising it you're redistributing it you give me
attribution so it's the CC by license which is literally Creative Commons - be
Y by MJ so you are now giving me attribution in the in the materials now
that you're redistributing so the idea behind the fact that we have that these
Creative Commons licences allows for this kind of sharing means that it's
also free so it's not that the resources are free and then you get all these
other things it's that these things make the resources free so these are the
primary affordances if you will based on the way I was describing them of the
materials and that's based on a specific kind of license called
CC Creative Creative Commons as the organization that put together those
license does that help a little bit we could we
could go on for the next hour in explaining this a little bit but if you
look up Creative Commons if you google it they've got a lot of really great
materials that will explain this further